古気候の復元と歴史天候データベース

抄録

In order to reconstruct the march of climate before instrumental observations in Japan, Historical Weather Data Base has been constructed. Weather descriptions in historical documents, such as official diaries of Feudal Clans in Edo Era, or of local offices in each clan, are objects of the data base. Other descriptions are in those diaries of large temples, large shrines and large farmers, and in some of private diaries Considering the description of weather phenomena in old diaries, they were grouped into 13 weather conditions In this data base, “weather range” means weather conditions in a day. A rough tendency of the weather in a day (HN), or remarkable conditions such as hot, cold, dry and wet (HT), are also important to understand weather conditions for each day. Accompanied phenomena (TK) and wind conditions (KT, TT, KH) are also objects to encode. Daily weather records for the years from 1700 to 1889 are mainly under collections. So far, more than 2, 500 years weather records have been inputted in the daily data base. The main files of the system are PC-DA (paleo climatic data), and PC-REC (paleo climatic record). The former consists of encoded weather data which will be used chiefly to retrieve weather conditions and to draw maps or to make tables. The latter contains weather descriptions in each day with Katakana, one of the Japanese characters. This will support detailed investigation
As an index of wet or dry condition for each month, “PI” is proposed. Weather conditions having some relations with precipitation are grouped to three kinds. Monthly frequencies of each type are multiplied by constants. These are 1 for “little rain”, 2 for “rain” and 5 for “much rain”. The total value in each month in each day is “PI”, which is useful for the comparison within the same daily series. The scatter diagrams of PI in Kokura Kita Kyushu City and Precipitation at Moji for each season are shown in Fig. 4. Time series of PI in 6 cities show the existence of different march in summer precipitations over Japan (Fig. 5). The monthly conditions in summer months from 1781 to 1789 are reconstructed in Fig. 6.